Windows Server Hyper-V is now a hypervisor for FreeBSD

As noted on the Openness@Microsoft blog this morning by Anandeep Pannu, Senior Program Manager for the Open Source Technical Center:

Today, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V. This collaboration, announced at BSDCAN 2012, will help more customers adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing. Microsoft is committed to supporting multiple platforms with its server virtualization solution so that more organizations can take advantage of server consolidation cost-savings and build foundations for private, public and hybrid cloud computing.

This release, which includes 8,500 lines of code released under the BSD license, is the result of collaboration between Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix to enable FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. My colleague Peter Galli had a blog post this spring about the announcement of this goal, and it’s great to see this work come to fruition so quickly! For further background, check out the interview with Joe CaraDonna, Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, in which he described how this project would “round out the FreeBSD virtualization story and make the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”

FreeBSD is the latest in a growing list of open-source operating systems and open-source cloud projects that work with Hyper-V, including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, Cs2C, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. This wide range of options makes it easier for customers to take advantage of server virtualization, enabling a variety of cloud computing and hybrid computing scenarios.

For more information about today’s announcement, see the blog post on Openness@Microsoft as well as the documentation and downloads available from the freebsdonhyper-v project on Github. The FreeBSD drivers are being prepared for inclusion in the FreeBSD core, and there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback).

Congratulations to all involved in reaching this important milestone! We’re looking forward to more good news from the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team going forward.

Thanks for your questions. Regarding timing and version details for preinstalled drivers, we’re in active discussions with various stakeholders and are also looking for community feedback, so your thoughts are much appreciated.

Regarding maintenance of the code, we are working with the FreeBSD community to get the drivers into the core FreeBSD source, and we’ll be working with them to determine support options going forward. Note that developers of proprietary FreeBSD-based operating systems that will use our drivers will also be announcing their support plans independently.

"there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback)."

The question is how "soon"? Will FreeBSD 9.1 have it? I think building Hyper-V 2012 support into FreeBSD 9.x series releases is the smart move because FreeBSD 9.x has NUMA support which is significant.

Another question is: who will be doing the maintenance of the code? FreeBSD developers or Microsoft?

Personally I think Microsoft should officially announce support of FreeBSD 9.x in Hyper-V 2012, as well as Ubuntu 12.04LTS. More officially supported OSes means faster customer adoption and migration onto the Hyper-V platform.